"What values make a good architect or urbanist?” is one of the questions that new master students get to answer in the 3-day introduction program of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. They are asked to draw a mind map with a picture of an architect or urbanist in the middle, and around it the knowledge, tools, skills and values that (s)he needs to have.

Privacy by design is important, but designers should always balance privacy against other values and interests. Absolute privacy by design is neither possible, nor desirable. This seemed to be a key idea in the presentations of both speakers at our Playground Meeting of 13 December 2018: Aaron Ding (TU Delft Faculty of Technology, Policy & Management) and Jacky Bourgeois (TU Delft Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering).

---Sheets and a video recording from this lecture can be found at the bottom of this post --- We can generally quite easily agree that values such as well-being, privacy, sustainability and justice are important. Less agreement is to be expected on what we take the meaning of these value to be. Is privacy a matter of having control over my personal data, or of certain parts of me and my life remaining hidden [...]

Given the digital revolution and the sustainability challenges, we now have to re-invent the way cities and human settlements are built and operated, and how cities can contribute to the solutions of humanity’s present and future existential problems. In the past, we had primarily two ways of addressing such issues: (1) nation-states (and their organization in the United Nations) and (2) global corporations. Both have not managed to deliver the necessary solutions on time, e.g. to problems such as climate change and lack of sustainability. Therefore, we propose a third way of addressing global problems: through networks of cities. So, how to unleash the urban innovation engine?

According to the American Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey we have to reinvent democracy every day anew… and now, in the age of big data and artificial intelligence, in addition we have to design for it, every day. If we cannot design against undemocratic tendencies and technically implement our democratic ideals and ideas, Jeroen van den Hoven and Haye Hazenberg argue, we risk losing them altogether.

How are values taken into account in projects that carry out research through industrial and architectural design? A seed project of the Delft Design for Values Institute (DDfV) is currently exploring this question. Preliminary results were presented at the DDFV Playground Meeting of 17 May 2018. In this blog post a short report on those results – and a call to participate in a follow-up workshop.

How does The Hague remain one of the most important cities in the world in the area of ​​Peace, Law, Justice and Security in the 21st century? The Hague owes its international reputation to recognizing problems and solving them pragmatically in times of high political tension, arms races and rapid technological change in the beginning of the 20th century. The metropolitan region of The Hague is also internationally associated with the cradle of thinking about World Peace and the International Rule of Law. In order to be able to play a similar role in the world in the 21st century, The Hague is now also facing with the challenge of understanding the nature of the problems of humanity and of offering solutions.

The Netherlands is internationally leading in ethical thinking about technology. After the incident regarding Cambridge Analytica it is clear that ethics and regulation are crucial for a decent digital society. But this requires an investment in responsible innovation, so DDFV scientific director Jeroen van den Hoven and Peter Paul Verbeek (professor in philosophy of technology at the University of Twente) argue in Dutch Newspaper Financieel Dagblad. IN DUTCH

Medical ethics needs to shift gears in the age of Big Data and AI if it wants to save the lives and dignity human beings and stay relevant. It needs to engage the digital world in its complexity and entanglement with industry. Without compromising on ethics, human well-being, human dignity and public interest under the pressure of profit maximization. It needs to seek responsible innovations and needs to design for moral values. Medical ethics is for a good part digital construction work in the remainder of the 21st century.